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Monday, November 17, 2008

I have purchased Animal Crossing: City Folk, a despite having previously built towns from the ground up on the Gamecube and Nintendo DS, I’m happily starting from scratch again. News to me: This game has a gay critter who can be randomly selected to live in your neck of the woods.

Okay, so maybe calling him gay is overstepping the matter somewhat. These characters don’t seem to have sex with anyone, male or female — at least on screen — but the fact that he is a male character who wears women’s clothes struck me as surprising, especially since Animal Crossing is made by Nintendo, who not so many years ago nixed the game Devil World from ever hitting the United States on grounds that its use of religious imagery could be considered blasphemous. There are still very few gay characters in video games in general, much less any in ones that children might want to play.

I had a similar encounter with slightly homosexual overtones in AC:CF. At one point, a female character decided to give my male character a more personal nickname - in this case, "muffin". Then, one of the big, buff, bodybuilder male characters picked it up and also started calling me "muffin". This later happened again with the name "cupcake" where a female character would set it up and a male character would start using it. Not that I mind being called that by another guy, but it's just really surreal being called that by another guy in a Nintendo game.

i don't care for Butch either. but you know, i'm pretty darn sure that is just a plain old shirt... not a dress! sometimes it appears to be on some animals but if you think about it, there are no dresses in the game!

i did used to think some of the charaters were bisexual, but for different reasons. they all had crushes on each other- male or female.